Geoffrey Chaucer presents a broader portrait of life in his Canterbury Tales both in the pilgrims and in the characters in their stories. He addressees a wide variety of social issues of his time in the different characters and in their stories. The Wife of Bath is one of the most colorful of the creations of Chaucer, and through her he comments on issues of love and marriage. The Wife of Bath is a worldly woman and as such contrasts with women like the Prioress. The Wife of Bath has had five husbands and other lovers, as is noted in the Prologue as the pilgrims assemble.
The Wife of Bath is introduced in the General Prologue along with the rest of the pilgrims. The wife of Bath is a woman of independent mind and body. She is also a successful small manufacturer and can be seen as a strong challenge to the male status quo. Of all the women in Chaucer, she is perhaps the most contemporary-seeming, and she represents potent and innovative social ideas as well as business concepts. She stands for the primacy of experience over authority, meaning the validity of the ideas of ordinary people against those in authority. The Wife of Bath expresses a feminist argument in the opening sequence as she turns clerical authority on its head to argue the feminist cause by way of a knowledge of the traditional materials of anti-feminist diatribe (Knight 98).
In what she has to say on the subjects of marriage and relations between the sexes, the Wife of Bath is reacting to the medieval attitudes then prevalent regarding sexual ideals and attitudes. The church then had a system that governed such matters. In the tenth century, a series of "penitential books" started to appear which explored the subject of sex in all its details, describing every misdeed at length and the penalties that would follow. There was an absolute ban on all sexual activity other than intercourse between married persons, and even that had to be carried out wit...